Sometime in the late 1980s I found myself at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, searching for what was there of the works of Max Mohr. It took every effort not to destroy the brittle Weimar-era texts as I photocopied them. Over the next few years I uncovered a diffuse trail of intriguing references and associations, but the trail became fainter and eventually stopped. Feeling that I had come to the end of the line, I named a character Mohr in my novel, Horace Afoot, as an homage to this vanished man from a vanished era. Then, in 1997, the very year the book was published, a novel of Max Mohr’s appeared in Germany, Das Einhorn (The Unicorn). It contained letters from Shanghai and an afterword by his grandson, Nicolas Humbert. I went to Munich to meet this unknown relative, and was immediately overwhelmed by the feeling of having stepped into Mohr’s life. The search for Max Mohr, which over the years had become a diverting bibliographic treasure hunt, took a sudden, unexpected turn. It became a living encounter. By far, the greatest pleasure in writing this book has been this renewed family tie and the friendship of Nicolas Humbert. His sensibility and shared sense of purpose both inspired and sustained my effort.
Although the story presented here is a fiction, I have relied heavily on historical and documentary materials. In addition to photographs, I have had privileged access to letters, manuscripts and family oral history. I also took the liberty of fashioning parts of dialogue between Mohr and D. H. Lawrence directly from their correspondence.
My thanks are due to many people, without whose generous assistance, this book would have not been possible: To Monika Westphal, for her patient and painstaking efforts deciphering Mohr’s script and making it accessible. To Fred Ramey, Joan Reuss, Werner Penzel, Christian Merillat, and Edward Weismiller for editorial and readerly insight. To Ursula Blömer of Universität Oldenburg for genealogical research, and Elisabeth Tworek of the Monacensia Archiv, München for archival resources. To Robert Leopold, Becky Malinsky, Ted Coyle, David Peterson, and Amy Marx for photographic assistance. To Robin Moody and Tamara Stock for a room with a view. And finally, to Gail and Sophie and Ava for everything else.
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